Blood Loss and Fog
by Dark Caustic
Summary: John asks, "Do you believe in life after death?"


**Blood Loss and Fog**

_Never I'll find someone like you._

Do you taste - every inch you can reach?  
>He's salty, like the sea. Something earthy - desert sand and tea.<br>Enough sadness to seep out of him, tainted by all those images of war, cruelty and murder.  
>Blood loss.<br>It sets into his shoulders, you see, stiff as a soldier, calm under pressure.  
>Your John.<p>

Who sits across from you (your lover now, eight long, knee-scraping years, whether from trips while running after killers or rug-burn from the carpet in the tender heat of passion unwound). Mulling tongue over lips and back, and you know what that tongue can _do._

You're quiet as he thinks, as he _decides_, your John. He's quiet, too. Always so silent when other men - men with nothing to say - are loud. Loud as though sound gives them reason and might. It doesn't.

So he asks, after shifting just once to place a leg over the other (good leg and bad leg, but he's much better now). Now that he has you, right? And he asks, "Do you believe in life after death?"

Your John is less scientific then you, less categorical, a little more forgiving, a little less bitter, even after it all. Craves gunpowder and war like you crave puzzles and clever people to challenge you. Craves you like you crave him (but only when the case is off, when you let yourself eat, when you let yourself sleep and give into other human necessities). Makes you love the little man a little bit more when he rolls onto his back beneath you and you can see the sigh of relief and know how much he waited, patiently waited, for your touch again. Makes you feel a bit guilty, but not enough to change, to give him more, because you're not sure there is anything more inside you to give. Besides, he loves you anyways, the way you are: starved, deprived and never still even when your body isn't moving.

And the case is on, the game is on, the poison is in the bottle and the clock is ticking and your stoic John is asking questions about belief, about feelings, about things outside the realm of fact.

Because he needs to know - your John is mortal flesh and he needs to _know_ about more than yes and more than no, the gray between the black and the white, the fog that hangs over a city at night. That you two are more than complimentary bones, that you have heart and you have soul and what should happen to one if the other should stop?

Your sentimental John who cries over the dead.

Asks you this after you _fell_, and were _gone _and returned from somewhere he thought you'd never come back from.

Of course, he couldn't see that you'd never been hurt at all.

But now he has to know what should happen if you stay in the beyond.

Your John, stocking his heart full of moments, finds there are not enough in there yet, at least when it comes to you.

* * *

><p>Sherlock curt and Sherlock cut, right through the gristle and to the bone. To tell the truth to the only man you'd dare share a speck of heart with. Isn't it kinder to tell the truth yet?<p>

That, "No, I don't believe there is anything after death."

After the chaos that buzzes in your head, is it too much to ask that when bones finally rest, the mind will get slumber as well? That it will be dark and silent finally, like the fog that smothers a city at night.

Your John nods like he already knows. Knew this was the answer, because, your little soldier boy knows you, doesn't he? Followed you around, eight long years, waited for you to return from the fall and knows your ins and outs like you know the city streets and park paths, even when they are played out in a fog or other foul weather.

John knew, but he needed it spoken. And then the matter rests like the dead.

* * *

><p><em>Of course Sherlock doesn't believe that the dead go on somewhere<em>, John thinks.

His detective is sound and reason embodied in cheekbones and lank, and there is no fact that gives light to the notion of life after death, to heaven or hell or anything between.

So when he is shot - straight through the heart - John can do nothing but hold him, hand over the wound, covered in blood, in grime, in reason, in the unjust world, and say his name over and over again like a mantra, as though that could somehow still the wound, stop the blood, halt the night, and bring him back from almost gone. From quiet stillness; from the nothing of darkness.

And he rocks back and forth ever so slightly while eyes the color of fog stare up at him, drifting, and begs - not God or the universe or time or anything existential - but the detective himself, to hold on, to keep on, to go on. Because his detective of logic and solid insight told him there was nothing beyond the death of life.

And Sherlock has never been anything but right.

* * *

><p>When Lestrade and the incorrigible Anderson finally pull him from the consulting detective's body, he screams and kicks and actually lands a blow.<p>

The irony of the rapidly developing black eye upon the forensic investigator goes unnoticed by the Yard and John alike.

Sherlock's John - who cries over the dead - does not cry now, but just sees red, while Anderson bags his jumper, streaked and soaked with pieces of Sherlock. Sees red in the back of a cruiser heading to the Yard. Sees red while he gives his statement. While he cleans the blood from his hands (and Lestrade stands over him in the Yard's bathroom watching him do so, afraid the good doctor might simply lose it).

All the way home, as dawn broke over Sherlock's London - his first true love the doctor knows. He knows. Sees red over Sherlock's 221b - his home no longer home as the heart of it has been removed with lead. Sees red when the door opens and Mrs. Hudson clings to him and cries.

Then all is still. Unbearably still in the lack of long coat, black hair, violin, footprints on the furniture.

* * *

><p>Your John, he doesn't taste like the sea now.<br>Nor of anything earthly - not tea or desert sand.  
>He tastes like absence. Like void. Like silence and the calm before storms.<br>Like something half-heartless.  
>He doesn't stand stoic now. His oatmeal jumper ruined by the stain of you.<br>Like a stain on his life - eight long years drowned in blood loss.

Your John has nothing left now, does he? He doesn't know the city and the streets and the ins and outs of observation like he knew the feel of your skin and the shape of your bones.

And the taste of your blood.

It'll never leave him. The way you clung to him - your handprints burned into the cloth of his clothes - struggling to hold on, too. Every time he said your name, a stone to step upon, to stay in the here and now, on Earth, in the white of black and white. But it faded - gray. And before you slipped down into that softness, touched his face once with two fingers, smeared red on the good doctor's lips, and offered yourself up.

He always was one for licking his lips and your death was no time to break the habit.

He sits now, in the night, your John, with his heart beat roaring as a river and the taste of your blood on his lips.

It'll never leave him. Nor will the sound of your violin, the rumble of your voice, or the ache he'll get now at the sight of bees.

But it will replace the taste of your living kiss.

* * *

><p>Now that it's over, you remember the quiet and it all makes sense.<p>

It was a heat you were too close to, to see. Something that burned so bright you couldn't see the source itself, but now it unravels in the dark and it makes sense. Spreads like a burning sense of shame inside you. You couldn't see before the blood loss.

That drugs and puzzles to unravel and murders and music and experiments - they were all addictive attempts to calm something inside. The beehive of mind and soul and _heart_ inside of you.

The longing for something to be unmoving and silent - if only for a moment.

Now you remember. You remember the feel of his back, riding his flesh, pressed him tight to your lips, tight to your hips.

In the near dark - the ghost dark. The street outside always humming with just enough light to keep the windows a brilliant shade of blue with curtains closed. Enough light to see him, moving, breathing under you, gasping for you. But not enough light to expose you two. Not stark, but soft.

Soft.

You remember. It was quiet, and calm - not frantic and desperate. Tender.

You remember that silence and how your mind finally calmed and nothing mattered, nothing at all, but bringing your John to completion.

And when the deed was done, your mind would stay quiet as you'd watch, just his chest rise and fall and watch him drift away - to some place he couldn't take you - in the tranquility of sleep.

That's what you wanted death to be like. Quiet and still.

But now that's over, and your blood has been washed away by a cleansing drizzle, you know you'll never have it back. That silence. That hushed room.

Some things, even death cannot bring you.

* * *

><p>Cats feet.<br>The fog rolls in.  
>She hushes the city in milky white, in murky light. Games of cat and mouse with fiction and reality - death and life, in that fog.<br>The color of a dead detective's living eyes.  
>John sits in his chair, across from Sherlock's empty chair. Yorick staring down at him as he licks his lips, forever licking the taste of death off of them.<br>When he can take no more, he falls asleep.  
>Descends into the fog.<p>

* * *

><p>You see him from behind - still stained in blood. The weight of it causing his straight shoulders to slump and he's broken.<p>

You're broken and calling out to him in the space between life and death and black and white, in that fog that hangs over your city at night, but does he hear?  
>Your John still breathes on the other side and the barrier holds you apart.<br>Black and white.  
>Could you climb back for him?<br>Could he call out for you?

* * *

><p>That's the rub. The stillness of John Watson pressed against the chaos of Sherlock Holmes. Rubbing his blonde hair against the black tresses of the other man. The light to the dark. White and black.<p>

Life and death.

There's not one without the other. But now you've been separated... maybe forever?

Yet John _finds_ you. Somehow. Your good doctor - he finds you in the in between.

In the murky haze of what lies between life and death, in the space you two created in love making. Disorder and order. Chaos and serenity.

At least, he speaks, your John, and calls you out. "You told me there was nothing after death."

"I was wrong," you admit - a Sherlockian way of saying 'I love you,' then press the pad of your thumb to his lips, right where you smeared your blood, and drink him in.

He sighs, the same way he did when you'd touch him after a case was over, and it makes the hole in your chest ache.

Because who knows how long this will last?

Fog often lifts when the mourning ends.


End file.
